


and there will be no more sorrows in the worlds to come

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, ennui?, fucking john hunger man, i said i wouldnt finish it but we all know im a lying liar, if you thinks this sounds familiar you probs read the beginning on tumblr, its been edited + doubled in length here, just a metric ton of purple prose gonna be honest haha, man iunno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 07:51:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11687274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: Here is the thing of it: everything lasts and everything dies and fuck the world and everything it is becoming, here you are, John says to his world, here is the terror of existence, here is pain and fear and love and passion and here it is again, over and over and over and here we are, John say-scream-sings the world. Here we are, becoming.





	and there will be no more sorrows in the worlds to come

**Author's Note:**

> ok look i dont even know. why the hell did the newest episode make me write about john hunger: bad rowdy boy of all people.

 

Here is the thing of it: everything lasts and everything dies and fuck the world and everything it is becoming, here you are, John says to his world, here is the terror of existence, here is pain and fear and love and passion and here it is again, over and over and over and here we are, John say-scream-sings the world. Here we are, becoming.

Here is John: motivational speaker, mouthpiece of false sentiment. Here is John, lover, writer, dreamer of dreams. Here is John playing chess in the park. Here is John walking to work in the rain. Here is John laughing with his friends at a bar in the early hours of the evening, John who imagines this moment forever, the moment ending. Here is John saying it will be okay. You are valuable. You have purpose, that you must look to the world and broaden your personal horizons, enlightenment is only footsteps away if you would only reach out and grab it.

Here is John, mouth chewing words he does not believe. 

Here is John, realizing the eternity of existence. Here is John, ripping pages out of his books, here is sleepless John at four in the morning thinking about all the other mornings that must continue and must continue and must continue. Here is John, wild-eyed, not ranting, no, John does not rant, John paces in lecture halls in perfectly pressed suits and here are his audiences wide eyed, rapt. Here are other speakers wide eyed, rapt. Here are his friends, colleagues, strangers. 

Here is John, slick vitriol pouring out of his mouth, sinking his words into the fertile soil of other imaginations. John, utterly convinced. Utterly convincing. 

Hunger is not a noun. Hunger is a verb, to hunger, to want, to desire, hunger is the grasping hands, the covetous eyes, the gaping mouths and here is this want for nothing, here is a toast to negative space, here is the paradox of paradoxes: want for unwanting. 

Discontent is the most powerful force in the universe. 

Here is John, becoming part of something. Becoming part of nothing. A negative space, a black absence, a nothing-nothing made of everything, the seeking tendrils, the ink-slick limbs. 

Here is John's world, and everything it is becoming. 

Where is John? There is no John. John is a noun, John is one droplet in an ocean, John is a tooth in a throatless maw chewing its way across existence. Here is a restless discontent, a non-entity coalesced of desire. John subsumed, eaten by the wants he has whipped into being.

John is going and going and going and if he gets far enough, if they get far enough, if they reach the end and eat the World Tree's roots and bring down Ragnarok from the myriad heavens then maybe that will be enough and they will stop becoming. Here is not-John chasing the Light of Creation across universe and universe and universe and there is no John and he deems it good. 

John is sitting at a table in a sunlit room. John is sitting in a chair across from a dwarf with flowers in his beard. John has a glass of water in front of him and is wearing a perfectly pressed suit, and this is the first time in a long time that he has had fingers. That he has had a brain. 

John feels curiosity. John feels the novelty of feeling. See John greet the dwarf, see John smile, cordial, falling back on his profession, John steepling his fingers together, John drumming his hands on the table of the boardroom like so many boardrooms. See John relishing the physical contact like a glass of water after months in the desert, John not knowing that this is something he relishes. 

See the dwarf introduce himself, see him profess his appreciation – and John is no stranger to fans, see John extend an outstretched hand. 

See John kill Merle, black tendrils outstretching. 

John coalescing into the whole, John de-coalescing, John appearing in a sunlit boardroom with Merle across from him. John, leaning forward, speaking. John with a mouth to speak with. 

Merle is congenial. John is congenial, trading questions and answers, snips and snaps of information like breadcrumbs that John will use to follow Merle all the way home. 

John plays white. Merle plays black.

"Johnny," Merle calls John. "Johnny boy." Says it like he's a person, and John has not been a person, person is a noun and John is a verb, an action, a force moving through the world consuming. John does not remember hugs, embraces, "Johnny!" they called to him, "Hows it going, Johnnyboy?" And Johnnyboy laughing, "Oh, its alright, you know how it is." 

John plays black. Merle plays white. 

"You rascal," Merle says, smiling. John smiling back, John with muscles and lips to smile with, John with white teeth poking through flesh. John relying on muscle memory. "Rascal!" they said to him, with John gloating over a particularly clever chess victory, with John teasing his boyfriend, with John grinning and saying "Yes, but what are you going to do about it?" before dipping his lover into a kiss. 

John plays white. Merle plays black. 

"Are you my friend?" Merle leaning forward, Merle asking. Merle, short and solid, a weight bending the reality of John's boardroom construct, Merle who smells like earth and greenery, Merle who asks questions like he expects John to answer. 

John remembering conceptual amity, John remembering dinners and walks in parks and study sessions and movies and smiles and hands holding hands, high fives, fistbumps, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. John remembering that time ends and time is endless and that each and every moment he spends is a slice of eternity so small to be nonexistent. John remembering the echo of happiness, John remembering that happiness is a lie force-fed down all of our throats, John realizing that he no longer remembers. 

John, gnawingly curious, John leaning forward, asking. 

Merle, speaking the slices of eternity that John knows do not exist. Merle speaking starlight, Merle speaking hope, Merle like all the other men and women John has known, Merle nothing like them, his single mind pitted against the current of John's tongue spinning quicksilver vicious. Merle bolstered by faith so blind that it makes John want to scream. 

John rebuking, John speaking the eternity and eternities and the endless and how it goes and goes and goes and can't you see, Merle, existence is the cruelest joke of all and it would be a sin not to snuff it all out. Merle, this is no apocalypse out of fury, it is a vengeance born out of love, out of desire, out of want to fuck the world and everything it is becoming. 

Merle, refusing. John, frowning. 

"Huh. I feel sad." 

John, killing. 

Here is John, sitting at table, here is John, dissolving into the black, the furniture, the room, the sunlight, a dissolution, John: nothing. 

Merle, diminished into a streak of light flying across the dimensional sky, John-not-John chasing, grasping with a body that is also a mouth, a devout devouring, a crunching across world and world and here is the tin can that evades him-them-all at every turn. Here is an eternity passing. 

Where is the Light? Where is Merle? 

Here is John, friendless, here is John, with no concept of the word "friend," here is John, his semi-conscious mind a single spark with a million thousand sparks screaming at him, where! Is! The Light! 

John does not know. John does not know the concept of knowing. John is a voice in a screaming soul chorus, John is being torn apart like the head of an ouroboros, John without the ability to understand what is happening, John hammered in the metaphysical head by need. 

And John is n ot Joh n is n ot J o hn a nd n o t- J o hn wan t s an d wa n t s a ndwan nt sandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsndwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwantsandwants and w a n t s. 

John, moving the single limb still available to him. 

A boardroom streaked with sunlight. A dwarf down an eye, up wrinkles, surprise coloring his complexion — and oh, John still recognizes surprise. That's a pleasant surprise. 

"Hello Merle," John says, the great growing rifts of the nothingnothing moving through him, the desperate need watching him. John with fingers and pits in his skin, John with eyes and cracks in his being. "You look like puke," Merle says, and John grins with teeth that shine bright and drip dark and John realizes that this emotion is called missing, this emotion is called happiness. This is a single slice of time and in it John feels joy. 

John is John again, John with a beating heart and conscious mind and a silver tongue to speak with. More like lead, these days. He's out of practice. 

John plays black. Merle plays white. 

Here is John, playing chess with lives. Here is Merle, reverent over his children, here is John thinking about how good it is to see Merle again. Here is Merle, calm and jocular even as John drips dark and they are watched by invisible eyes. Merle, John's only friend. John, remembering friendship. 

This time, there are no questions, no parry and riposte. Here is John, moving pieces. Here is Merle, countering. Here is Merle's description of a miracle in a slice of eternity spreading, and here is something John never understood. 

"T here’s something that is so… indescribable about being part of bringing a new life into the world. It’s — it really is something you can’t describe to anybody else." 

Merle's eyes bright. John's eyes staring. Here is John remembering: pain and fear and love and passion, existing. Here is Merle, blithe and graceless and asking, always asking, Merle has always treated him like a person and John has spent so long not being one. 

"I told people what they needed to hear." 

Here is John being swallowed up by want, here are limbs collapsing, here is his throat screaming, here is bone breaking and blood flowing but there is no more blood and no more bone, there is no John and no anything and bodies are meaningless and love is a slice of time in an eternity so big as to never have existed. 

Here is John, single mouth in a screaming chorus. Here is John, scholar, lover, friend. 

Here is John wrapped in the arms of John's only friend in the entirety of existence and he is not enough, he would never have been enough but he is here. And here are John eyes closed, his consciousness fractaling, here is John's silver tongue speaking. 

"Break the bonds, Merle, break —" 

The past tense of hunger is eaten. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> the name john no longer means anything to me, holy shit, ive used it so many times.
> 
> there was a very specific emotion that i wanted to capture with this, but damned if i can name it. if any of you figure it out, by all means let me know.
> 
> im on tumblr as @[anonymousalchemist](http://anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com/), come talk to me about ennui and dimensional vore, i guess?


End file.
